Keyword Research and Selection for Personal Injury Law

Effective PPC in personal injury law hinges on meticulous keyword research and selection. This niche, covering diverse case types from auto accidents to medical malpractice, demands a targeted approach to keywords. Our strategy at Go Fish is defined by relevance and search intent, ensuring your ads reach those actively seeking legal help.

Our process begins with an in-depth analysis of personal injury law’s various facets, allowing us to identify relevant, high-volume keywords. We leverage tools like Ahrefs to understand search traffic and trends, ensuring our keyword choices align with what potential clients are searching for. This isn’t just about finding popular terms; it’s about understanding the specific language and queries used by those in need of personal injury legal services.

We specialize in pinpointing long-tail keywords – specific, less competitive phrases used by clients closer to hiring a lawyer. For instance, we target phrases like “experienced slip and fall lawyer in [Location]” instead of broader terms like “personal injury lawyer.” These high intent keywords effectively capture the attention of clients ready to engage.

Equally important is our focus on negative keywords. These are terms we strategically use to exclude irrelevant traffic, ensuring your ads are seen by a genuinely interested audience. This approach prevents wasteful ad spending and increases the likelihood of attracting qualified leads.

Creating Compelling Ad Copy and Landing Pages

The cornerstone of any successful PPC campaign, especially in personal injury law, lies in crafting compelling ad copy paired with effective landing pages. These elements are not just about attracting clicks; they are about converting these clicks into client consultations.

Our approach to ad copy focuses on empathy and clarity. We understand that potential clients are often in distressing situations, seeking immediate help. Our ads speak directly to their needs, offering reassurance and a clear path to legal assistance. We use persuasive, action-oriented language with strong calls to action (CTAs) like “Schedule a Free Consultation Today” or “Expert Legal Help Available 24/7”. This approach not only resonates with the target audience but also emphasizes urgency to take the next step.

Landing pages are where the promises made in your ads come to fruition. They are designed to be user-friendly, informative, and reassuring, mirroring the tone and message of the ad copy. Key elements include clear, concise content outlining your firm’s expertise in personal injury cases, client testimonials for credibility, and a straightforward, easy-to-find contact form or call option. We ensure these pages are optimized for mobile users, given the high likelihood of clients searching on handheld devices. Check out our full CRO checklist for more landing page tips.

Optimizing CPL Goals and Automated Bid Strategies in Google Ads

Determining an optimal Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) goal is crucial in personal injury PPC campaigns, as it directly influences the effectiveness of your bid strategy. At Go Fish Digital, we focus on establishing a CPL that aligns with your firm’s financial objectives and market dynamics. To set a realistic CPL goal, we analyze the average client value in personal injury cases and the expected conversion rate from leads to clients (this may vary among case types). This helps gauge how much you can afford to spend per lead while maintaining profitability, especially if the average case value is high.

To achieve these CPL goals, we leverage automated bid strategies within Google Ads, like “Target CPA” bidding. This strategy uses Google’s machine learning to adjust bids, targeting an average CPA equal to your set CPL goal. It analyzes historical data and contextual signals, optimizing bids for each auction to balance competitiveness and cost efficiency.

We also utilize “Maximize Conversions” with a set target CPA. This approach aims to maximize conversion volume within your CPL constraints, ideal for balancing lead volume with cost-effectiveness.

By integrating these automated strategies, we ensure that your personal injury PPC campaign is not just reaching the right audience but doing so efficiently. We continuously monitor and adjust these strategies, aligning them with real-time performance data and market changes, thus maximizing ROI and driving high-quality leads to your law firm.

Assessing PPC Campaign Success for Personal Injury Law Firms

For personal injury law firms, evaluating PPC campaign success hinges on specific metrics that provide direct insights into performance and ROI. There are two key metrics that we prioritize in our reporting:

1. Cost-Per-Lead (CPL): CPL shows the cost effectiveness of your campaign in generating potential clients. A lower CPL, aligned with your firm’s budget, indicates a more efficient campaign.
2. Lead Quality and Client Potential: It’s not just about the number of leads; it’s about their potential to become clients. Analyze the quality of leads by tracking follow-up outcomes. Are these leads converting into consultations or clients?

Our top-performing personal injury law firm clients significantly boost the effectiveness of our campaigns by offering comprehensive feedback on the quality of leads generated. This critical information forms a complete data loop, allowing us to pinpoint both successes and potential areas for growth, which in turn enhances our ability to fine-tune and optimize campaigns with greater precision. Interpreting these metrics effectively involves a balanced approach, considering both quantitative data and qualitative aspects of client acquisition. By consistently reviewing and understanding these metrics, we make well-informed decisions that align closely with our clients’ goals for client acquisition, thereby ensuring that your PPC campaigns are not only targeted but also strategically poised for success.

Conclusion

Remember, the effectiveness of a law firm PPC campaign is not just measured by clicks and impressions but by the quality of leads and the ROI it generates. Regularly assessing and refining these strategies in response to market dynamics and campaign data is vital in staying ahead in the competitive legal landscape. With a thoughtful approach to each element of your PPC campaign, your law firm can effectively turn online searches into valuable client relationships, driving growth and success in the ever-evolving digital world.

PPC for Personal Injury Lawyers is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

This article will take you on a guided tour through our top LinkedIn ad tips and best practices, all specifically tailored to LinkedIn and derived from our real-world experiences. Read on to unlock the full potential of LinkedIn ads for your B2B marketing success.

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1. Embrace Lead Gen LinkedIn Ads

Lead gen ads on LinkedIn have proven to be a cornerstone of our strategy. These ads provide pre-filled lead forms, making the process of submitting contact information a breeze for users. A key point to remember with lead gen ads is the absence of a full landing page to convince someone to provide their information. Therefore, your ad and lead form should effectively communicate the benefits to the user. Craft your lead form language to be persuasive, clear, and above all, optimized for engagement.

2. Choose Manual Bidding to Keep Costs Low

In the world of automated bidding, choosing the Manual bid strategy on LinkedIn might seem counter-intuitive. However, our experience and discussions with LinkedIn representatives confirm that an automated bid strategy often leads to an increase in cost-per-click (CPC) over time. When this happens, duplicating your campaign and launching a new version with a Manual bid strategy can be a highly effective solution. Finding the right bid amount manually might require some trial and error in the initial weeks, but the results are often lower, more sustainable CPCs. We’ve seen about a 17% decrease in CPCs for our clients. 

3. Stick to One Audience Per Campaign

To understand the performance of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement, it’s crucial to stick to one audience per campaign. Let’s say, for instance, you’re aiming to target a certain job title and a retargeting list as distinct audiences with your ads. We’ve found it’s really beneficial to target those audiences separately in two different campaigns. While platforms like Google Ads will break down performance metrics by your targeted audience, LinkedIn’s dashboard doesn’t provide the same granular information to evaluate each audience’s performance. Segregating audiences into separate campaigns allows for more accurate performance assessment and targeted improvements. 

4. Target Larger LinkedIn Ads Audiences for Better Performance

While targeted segmentation is crucial, larger audiences tend to perform better on LinkedIn. We’ve found that if your audience size dips below 5,000-10,000 users, performance may take a hit. It’s essential to strike a balance between audience segmentation and size for optimal campaign performance.

5. Use ‘Rotate Evenly’ Ad Setting for Effective A/B Testing

A/B testing is a staple of successful ad campaigns, and LinkedIn ad creative is no exception. From headlines to intro text to images and ad types, there are endless opportunities to run A/B tests. However, when you do this, ensure you’re using the ‘rotate ads evenly’ ad setting. If you don’t, LinkedIn tends to immediately pick a winner and may not display your other ads sufficiently for fair testing. To find this setting, you’ll go to the Ads page within your campaign and click the settings symbol. 

6. Don’t Forget to Add Exclusions To LinkedIn Ads

Even if your targeting is razor-sharp and Audience Expansion is not enabled, some users outside your intended audience might appear in demographic reports. 

For example, let’s say you want to specifically target companies with more than 500 employees. You’ll add a target for the company sizes over that number. But if it’s critical that you don’t spend ad dollars on companies smaller than 500 employees, then you should also add an exclusion for those company sizes as well. 

While it may not be scalable to exclude every single audience segment that falls outside your target, doing this for the most critical audience aspects is a good idea. Regularly reviewing demographic reports can help identify and exclude any irrelevant audience segments, improving campaign performance and ROI.

7. Go for Job Function and Member Skills Over Job Titles

While it may seem intuitive to target based on Job Titles, Job Function and Member Skills often yield better results due to the sheer size of these audiences. Combining Job Function and Member Skills with Job Seniorities ensures you’re reaching the right levels within your target audience. 

Member Skills are based on the Skills and Endorsements section of the user profile, along with skills mentioned in their profile text or simply inferred from their profile. Job Function is based on tasks or activities common for the user’s job position. You can see how much more broad these criteria are compared with guessing each specific Job Title that you might want to reach. We’ve found these targeting methods to draw in the same demographics, just in larger numbers with Job Functions and Member Skills.

8. Go Beyond Website Retargeting

LinkedIn offers great options for retargeting audiences outside of just website visits. You can build a list of users who engaged with your single image ad, opened or submitted your lead form, viewed a video ad and more. We love using this for our clients as an easy way to identify users who engage with ad content and target them with a specific message relevant to the action they took. It’s a convenient way to stay top-of-mind with engaged prospects.

9. Use Square Images for Versatility

When it comes to image ads, going square (1080×1080) can ensure your ads look great on both desktop and mobile. This ad size provides more real estate than horizontal ads and more versatility than a mobile-only vertical ad size. Using square images allows for a streamlined set of ads that you know will reach your target audience, regardless of the device they’re using. 

10. Craft Winning LinkedIn Ads

Lastly, crafting the perfect ad copy and imagery is crucial. Incorporate compelling stats into your ad copy – LinkedIn found a 37% increase in click-through rate (CTR) by doing this. Incorporating images of people into ads has also been found to increase CTR by an impressive 160%. Always include a Call To Action (CTA) button on the image. Remember, LinkedIn’s CTA options may not always perfectly align with your specific needs, so it’s critical to incorporate your own CTA directly onto the image. Keep your messaging concise and clear to set your ad apart from the noise of the LinkedIn feed.

LinkedIn advertising, when used effectively, can be a potent tool in your marketing arsenal. Remember, like all paid social media strategies, constant testing, learning, and optimization are key. Here’s to harnessing the power of LinkedIn with these tips to elevate your brand’s visibility and growth!

LinkedIn Ads Tips: 10 Best Practices For B2B Digital Marketing Success is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads. These ads can be displayed on various platforms, including search engine results pages (think Google Ads) and social media (like LinkedIn).

PPC is an amazing tool for lead generation because it allows businesses to target specific audiences based on their search intent or demographic information. For instance, you can set up search ad campaigns that target keywords related to your business, ensuring that your ads appear when people search for products or services like yours. You can also create social media ad campaigns that target users based on their interests, behaviors, and other demographic criteria, ensuring that your ads are shown to people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

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This targeting ability means that businesses can maximize their ad spend by only reaching out to people who are more likely to convert into leads or customers. On top of that, PPC advertising offers measurable results and insights into the effectiveness of campaigns, allowing businesses to quantify ROI and optimize their strategies.

Understanding the Basics of Lead Generation

Before diving into the world of PPC advertising, it’s important to understand the basics of lead generation. Essentially, lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential customers into leads. This involves identifying your target audience, creating a value proposition that meets their needs, and delivering it through the right channels.

Lead generation is crucial for businesses as it enables them to establish a pipeline of potential customers and increase their chances of converting them into actual paying customers. By generating leads through various marketing efforts, businesses can build brand awareness, foster engagement with their brand, and ultimately convert leads to sales. 

PPC advertising can help businesses generate leads at every stage of the buying funnel. By targeting users with relevant messages and offers, businesses can attract potential customers who are searching for information, considering their options, or ready to make a purchase.

The key to lead generation is creating effective strategies to capture people’s information and turn them into leads once they’ve clicked on your ads and arrived on your website or landing page. For example, you might offer a free guide, e-book, webinar, or consultation in exchange for their contact details. 

Here’s an example of the HR platform Lattice offering an HR calendar to HR professionals with important dates, reminders and tips. You can clearly see the hook of providing clear value to the exact decision maker who would buy a platform like Lattice.

Another example is Docusign, who is targeting sales leaders with an e-book on how to overcome their top challenges. By addressing top of mind issues faced by its target audience, Docusign is able to capture contact information from those LinkedIn users.

By using PPC advertising on search and social media platforms, you can increase your visibility, attract more targeted traffic, and convert more visitors into leads and customers.

Creating a PPC Strategy for Lead Generation

So, how can you use PPC to generate leads? It all starts with a well-crafted strategy. This involves knowing your audience, setting clear goals, selecting the right channels, understanding your competition, and choosing the right CTAs. By following these steps, you can create campaigns that effectively target your audience, differentiate your brand from competitors, and drive conversions at every stage of the funnel. 

In this section, we’ll explore each of these steps in more detail to help you develop a successful PPC lead generation strategy.

Know Your Audience

The first step to successful PPC lead generation is to know your audience like the back of your hand. Take the time to conduct thorough research and create detailed buyer personas that include everything from demographics and psychographics to pain points and objections. By doing this, you can create ad copy and assets that speak directly to your target audience, offering them solutions to their problems and increasing the chances of getting those coveted clicks and conversions. 

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can use different targeting options available on different platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads, including demographics, interests, job titles, and company size, to reach those people.

Set Clear Goals

To make the most of your investment in paid media, it’s essential to set clear goals for your campaigns. These goals should align with your overall business objectives and be specific, measurable, and achievable. For example, you might set a goal to generate a certain number of leads per month, increase your conversion rate, or reduce your cost per lead. You should also have a way of quantifying the quality of the leads you generate through your PPC campaigns to provide data for audience targeting optimizations. Once you have clear goals in place, you can use data to track your progress and make adjustments as needed. 

Select the Right Channels

Part of understanding your target audience is knowing what channels will be most effective for reaching them. 

For B2B lead generation, LinkedIn advertising is a must. With LinkedIn Ads, you can target specific companies, job titles, company sizes, and industries to ensure that your ads are seen by the people who matter most to you. LinkedIn even has an ad type specifically for lead generation with an auto-filled form that users can submit directly in the platform, creating a frictionless form submit experience.

Paid search advertising (Google Ads) allows you to show your ads to people who are actively searching for solutions related to your product or service. You can actually layer in audience information with your keyword targeting to get even more specific about who and what searches you want to bid on.

Outside of these two, there are countless other platforms that you might find effective for reaching your target audience. If you’re targeting Boomers, Facebook may be part of your mix while TikTok may work great for targeting a Gen Z audience. Selecting your channel mix will be a combination of your audience research and the targeting capabilities you need to focus your ad spend on key audiences.

Know Your Competition

Competitor research is another essential element of a successful PPC strategy. By analyzing your competitor’s campaigns, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses, and develop campaigns that differentiate you from them.

Tools like SpyFu and SEMRush can help you analyze your competitor’s campaigns, including their keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. 

(image from SEMRush)

By using these tools, you can identify gaps in your competitor’s campaigns and develop strategies that capitalize on them. In addition to these tools, do some manual research. Search your keywords, get on your competitor’s retargeting list, and visit their landing pages. Go through the buyer journey to find opportunities to create a more clear value proposition and a smoother customer experience.

The goal of competitor research is not to copy what your competitors are doing, but to build off of their learnings and do it better!

Choose the Right CTAs for Your Audience

To determine what offers or calls-to-action (CTAs) to advertise in a PPC lead generation campaign, you should consider the audience you’re targeting and where they are in the sales funnel. 

• At the top of the funnel, for users who are still in the awareness stage, you can offer informative and educational content, such as e-books, whitepapers, or blog posts, to provide value and establish credibility. 
• In the middle of the funnel, for users who are considering their options, you can offer more personalized content, such as webinars, demos, or free trials, to help them evaluate your offerings. 
• At the bottom of the funnel, for users who are ready to make a purchase, you can offer discounts, free consultations, or other incentives to encourage them to take action.

To determine the most effective offers or CTAs for your specific audience, you can use audience targeting and segmentation to understand their needs, preferences, and behavior. By analyzing data such as search queries, interests, and social media engagement, you can create tailored messaging and offers that resonate with your target audience and move them closer to conversion. Additionally, you can use A/B testing and analytics to measure the effectiveness of different offers and CTAs, and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

Targeting Strategies for Lead Generation

In the world of lead generation, targeting strategies are crucial for success. By using techniques like keyword targeting, negative keywords, audience targeting, retargeting, and account-based marketing, you can reach the right people with the right message at the right time, increasing the likelihood of generating high-quality leads and ultimately driving sales.

Keyword Targeting

When selecting keywords for a lead gen search campaign, it’s essential to conduct thorough audience research to identify the phrases and search terms that your target audience is using to find solutions to their problems. Use the detailed buyer personas mentioned above that include demographics, psychographics, pain points, and objections.

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to identify high-volume, low-competition keywords that align with your buyer personas. To further refine your keyword selection, consider using long-tail keywords, which are more specific and targeted than broad keywords. Long-tail keywords are less competitive and typically have higher conversion rates, making them a valuable addition to your campaign.

Remember to continually monitor and optimize your keyword performance and search terms to ensure that your campaign is generating high-quality leads. By regularly analyzing your campaign data, you can adjust your keyword strategy, refine your targeting, and maximize your return on investment.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords might sound like a bad thing, but they’re actually a powerful tool for generating high-quality leads. By excluding irrelevant traffic, you’re making sure that your ad spend is going towards people who are most likely to convert. Take the time to identify and use negative keywords in your PPC campaigns, and make sure your ad copy is relevant and compelling. When you focus on the right search queries and offer users solutions to their pain points, you’re more likely to see a higher conversion rate and a higher ROI. Negative keywords might seem counterintuitive, but they can help you achieve your PPC lead generation goals more efficiently and effectively.

Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is a core component of a successful lead generation campaign, and it can be used effectively on both paid search and social media channels. By leveraging audience targeting, you can ensure that your ads are shown to the right people at the right time, increasing the likelihood of generating high-quality leads.

On Google Ads, one effective audience targeting method is to use in-market audiences. In-market audiences are groups of people who are actively researching or considering products or services similar to yours. By targeting these audiences, you can reach people who are already interested in what you have to offer, increasing the likelihood of generating leads. You can also use your Google Analytics data to identify other audiences that are highly engaged on your site, then observe those audiences in your Google Ads campaigns to gauge performance before targeting them.

On social media channels, such as LinkedIn, audience targeting can be even more powerful. LinkedIn Ads lets you target people based on factors such as job titles, seniority, company size, and industry. By targeting these audiences, you can reach decision-makers and influencers who are more likely to be interested in your offerings and have the authority to make purchasing decisions.

To use audience targeting effectively on LinkedIn, it’s important to conduct thorough research and create detailed buyer personas. This will help you understand the needs, pain points, and behavior of your target audience, enabling you to create ad copy and offers that resonate with them. For example, if you’re targeting people in a specific industry, you can use industry-specific language and examples to make your ad more relevant and compelling.

In addition to job titles and seniority, LinkedIn also offers other audience targeting options, such as company size, location, and interests. By using a combination of these targeting options, you can refine your audience and ensure that your ads are shown to the people who are most likely to be interested in your offerings.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a powerful technique used to re-engage with potential customers who have already shown an interest in your product or service. With retargeting, you can display ads to people who have already visited your website, engaged with your content, or taken some other action that indicates they are interested in what you have to offer. By reminding them of your brand and offering them additional incentives to convert, you can significantly increase your chances of driving conversions and generating leads.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) can be a powerful tool in a PPC lead gen strategy because it allows you to focus your efforts on the highest-value accounts. Rather than casting a wide net and hoping to attract leads from a broad audience, ABM allows you to identify the companies and decision-makers that are most likely to be interested in your products or services and tailor your messaging to their specific needs.

By targeting these high-value accounts with personalized PPC campaigns, you can increase the likelihood of generating high-quality leads and ultimately driving conversions. With the help of tools like 6Sense, you can identify accounts that are actively researching solutions like yours and create ads that speak directly to their pain points and offer solutions that are specific to their business.

In addition to the increased effectiveness of your PPC campaigns, ABM can also help improve your overall lead gen strategy by aligning your marketing and sales teams around a shared set of target accounts. This can help ensure that your efforts are focused on the accounts that are most likely to drive revenue and can lead to better coordination between your teams, resulting in more effective lead nurturing and follow-up.

Best Practices for PPC Lead Generation

To get the most out of your PPC advertising campaigns for lead generation, there are several best practices to keep in mind. 

1. A/B Test Everything

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process of comparing two versions of something to determine which one performs better. It’s an essential part of any PPC strategy. Test different ad copies, landing pages, and offers to see what works best for your audience. Remember to test one element at a time so you can isolate which changes are driving the most significant improvements.

2. Refine Your Targeting

It’s also important to regularly review and refine your targeting strategies. Use data to identify which keywords and targeting options are generating leads most effectively and adjust your campaigns accordingly. 

3. Optimize Your Forms and Landing Pages

Don’t overlook the importance of conversion rate optimization for your landing pages. Your landing pages should be designed specifically for lead generation, with a clear call-to-action and a simple form to collect contact information. Use A/B testing to identify which landing page design and messaging generates the highest conversion rates.

4. Measure Success

Measurement and analysis are critical components of any PPC strategy. The metrics you track will depend on your goals, but common metrics include click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), and cost per acquisition (CPA).

Before launching your campaigns, it’s crucial to set up proper tracking and measurement so that you can accurately monitor your success. Use tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or other marketing automation software to track your leads’ behavior and conversion rates. These tools can help you understand which campaigns and keywords are driving the most leads, which ad copy is resonating with your audience, and which landing pages are converting at the highest rates.

5. Write Standout Ad Copy

Your ad copy is the first thing that potential leads will see when they come across your ad. It’s essential to write copy that stands out and grabs their attention.

To write standout ad copy, focus on your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – the thing that sets your product or service apart from your competitors. Use compelling language that resonates with your target audience, and include a clear call-to-action that encourages them to take action. Your ad copy should be clear, concise, and focused on how your offering solves a problem or meets a need for your audience. Use emotional triggers, such as fear of missing out (FOMO) or urgency, to persuade your audience to take action.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

While PPC can be a powerful tool for lead generation, there are several common mistakes that businesses make when creating and running these campaigns. These mistakes include:

• Neglecting negative keywords: Failing to include negative keywords can result in wasted ad spend and low-quality leads.
• Not optimizing landing pages: Landing pages should be optimized for lead generation to maximize the effectiveness of your ads.
• Not targeting the right audience: Targeting the wrong audience can result in low-quality leads and wasted ad spend.
• Failing to test and iterate: Continual testing and iteration are critical to the success of any search ad campaign.

By avoiding these mistakes and following the best practices outlined in this guide, businesses can create effective PPC ads for lead generation that drive high-quality leads and generate a positive return on investment.

Conclusion

PPC advertising is a highly effective channel for generating leads, but it requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. By understanding the basics of lead generation, creating a targeted PPC strategy, and using the right targeting options and best practices, you can generate high-quality leads at a lower cost and grow your business.

Mastering PPC for Lead Generation: A Comprehensive Guide for Digital Marketers is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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What is Quality Score?

Google Quality Score is a measurement of the overall quality of an ad and landing page. It is calculated on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being the highest). 

Quality Score is central to the credibility and success of Google Ads. Why? 

When it was introduced in 2002, Quality Score meant that the top SERP position didn’t just go to the advertiser with the highest bid. Instead, ad rank was now determined by both bid and relevance. This shift was a key differentiator for Google at the time. 

Think about it. Google earns (a lot of) revenue from searchers clicking on ad results. Every time someone clicks an ad, that’s money in Google’s pocket. To drive those clicks, searchers need to be able to trust that the ads they see are relevant to their search. If the ads were full of spam or irrelevant results, searchers would quickly adapt and learn to not click on those ads. By prioritizing quality, Google maintains user trust and loyalty, which in turn benefits the entire Google ecosystem, including Google Ads. Google uses Quality Score to ensure that users are presented with high-quality and relevant ads that provide a positive user experience. 

On the flip side, advertisers want to spend their marketing dollars on a search engine that their target audience trusts (and where they are likely to click on ads) and where they know they’ll be connected to the right audience. Quality Score not only builds trust for the searcher, but it also creates good results for its advertisers too. Quality Score also has a direct impact on an advertiser’s cost per click (CPC). By rewarding more relevant ads with higher Quality Scores, Google incentivizes advertisers to focus on relevancy and the user experience. 

Google is highly incentivized to make sure both sides (advertisers and searchers) are confident in the results. Once you understand Quality Score through this lens, you’ll start to see QS not as a burden to optimize, but as a way to find opportunities to improve the user experience and your results.

How to Improve Your Google Ads Quality Score

Below are the best ways to improve your Google Ads Quality Score:

1. Optimize Your Google Ads Group Structure

Both landing pages and ad copy are determined at the ad group level. I’m always a fan of having as streamlined a structure as possible and not setting up more campaigns or ad groups than you need. But, there are valid reasons to divide out keywords into more segmented ad groups, and Quality Score is one of those reasons.

First, consider your ad copy. Having your ad copy be relevant and reflective of your keywords and search terms is a key component of a high Quality Score. However, there’s only so much space available for ad copy, and you may find that you can’t squeeze in all the keywords in your ad group into just one search ad. Instead, you can break up your ad groups into more specific keyword themes and increase the occurrence of your keywords and search terms in your ads. 

For example, maybe you’ve got an ad group that contains the keywords “productivity software” and “productivity tool.” These keywords are very similar in intent and theme, but perhaps separating them into two ad groups would allow your ads to more directly relate to those individual keywords.

The same concept applies for landing pages. Because you want your landing page to reflect the keywords you’re bidding on and also the ad copy, you may find that having more specific keywords in a larger number of ad groups allows you to use more highly specific landing pages that speak to the exact search term the user is looking for information on.

With both ad copy and landing pages, not only would you be improving your Quality Score by restructuring your ad groups, you’re also likely going to see increases in click-through rate and conversion rate along the way as the user starts to see their intent repeated right back to them by your ad and website. By doing that, you’re building trust and relevancy with the user. Once again, we see that what’s good for quality score benefits both the user and the advertiser.

2. Bid on the Right Keywords

This might seem like either the most obvious or off-the-wall Quality Score recommendation you’ve heard, but it’s worth saying because of the nature of search in 2023. Because phrase match, and even exact match, function more like broad match these days, your keywords may mean that your ads show for a very, well, broad and potentially irrelevant set of search terms. 

How does that impact Quality Score? Google is looking not just at the keywords you bid on for ad and landing page relevance, but also at the search terms you show up for. Google wants to see your ad and landing page content matching the intent of the user’s actual search, not just the keyword you target. 

For many reasons, including for achieving strong Quality Scores, make sure that search term reviews are a frequent and in-depth part of your optimization strategy. By adding negative keywords, editing match types or even pausing keywords that don’t bring in the right intent, you’ll ensure that your search term intent closely aligns with your keywords. With that alignment in place, you’ll find better Quality Scores and also more relevant traffic coming to your site via Google Ads.

3. Use Your Keywords and Search Terms in Ad Copy

Piggybacking on the point above, you should include not just your keywords but also your search terms in your ad’s headlines and descriptions. With ad relevance being one of the components of Quality Score, the old guidance was to make sure your keywords appear in your ad copy. But the evolution of match types means that the keywords you select to target, even when they’re exact match, trigger your ad for a much broader set of search terms in the actual auction itself. Google’s guidance on improving ad relevance has evolved along with match type definitions.

Google encourages advertisers to base ad relevance on intent, not just the literal keywords you’re bidding on. To do this, pull the search terms for a certain keyword over a 30-day period by going to your keyword list and checking the box next to your keyword. When you check that box, a new blue box will appear and you can select “Search terms”. This will give you a list of search terms that triggered your ad. Now, when you go to optimize your ad relevance, you can make sure that the most common search terms are included in your headlines and descriptions alongside the keywords themselves. 

4. Improve Your Landing Page Experience

The reason why Google lists “landing page experience” as a Quality Score factor instead of “landing page relevance” is because this component is so much more than just the words on the page. Going back to the idea that Google wants to ensure a great experience for both users and advertisers through Google Ads, a slow or non-mobile friendly site will frustrate a user who clicked on your ad, and as a result they’ll be less likely to convert. No one wins. 

For any site visitor, but especially ones that you’re paying per click for, your main goal should be to:  

1. Let the user know clearly what action you want them to take on your site 
2. Take away all friction and distraction from that action. Chances are, if you’re not seeing conversions from your landing page, your landing page experience scores are also rated below average.

There are 2 areas outside of on-page content that you should focus on when it comes to your landing pages:

1. Page speed: Your site should load quickly, and you can use this tool to test it.
2. Mobile friendliness: Your landing page should be easy to view and navigate on a mobile device. This tool gives you an analysis of your page’s mobile friendliness.

Not only will you improve your Quality Score, you’ll also see a lot more ROI from your ads if you can fix any of the issues above. If your landing page isn’t converting users on your site, that may be a sign that one of the above is causing friction for the user.

5. Coordinate Your Ad Copy and Landing Page Content 

My mom always told me the key to dressing well was not matching but coordinating. The same goes for ad copy and landing pages. You don’t need to robotically repeat the exact same phrasing on both, but Google does look for consistency in messaging across ad copy and landing page copy. Having these 2 components reflect and complement one another will not only improve your Quality Score, but it will also create a sense of credibility for your brand while also reinforcing your brand messaging.

Think about some of the best branding you know of – Nike, Coca-Cola, etc. Part of the reason those brands are so recognizable to you is because the marketing is consistent. If your search ad focuses on a promotion, such as 20% off for first-time customers, then your landing page should clearly present that same promotion. Otherwise, the user will bounce back to the search result thinking where did that offer go? 

Knowing your brand’s greatest value propositions and making those extremely clear in both your ad copy and your landing page, those value propositions will be more likely to stick with the user and become synonymous with your brand. Don’t try to be everything to everybody – know why customers buy from you and let your messaging focus on that unique value proposition.

6. Improve Click-Through Rate with Compelling Ad Copy

Expected click-through rate (CTR) is one of the components of Quality Score, and increasing your CTR is good for not just quality score, but generally driving more traffic to your site from Google Ads. CTR is all about having compelling ad copy that engages your target audience and convinces them to click on your ad. 

What makes ad copy compelling?

• Clear language. Text ads are short, meaning you have a very small number of characters to send users your most important message. Don’t let it get weighed down with hard to understand or jargon-riddled language.
• It stands out. Go to the Ad Preview Tool and look at the SERP for your keywords. What stands out to you? Are competitors using the word “free” or putting pricing or discount information in their ad copy? Those are eye-catching tactics that you could use in your ad copy as well. 
• Use all of the available assets (think sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, location and call extensions). Not only do assets help you own more real estate on the SERP, it gives you more opportunities to show the user exactly why they should click on your ad. 
• Always have a CTA. Tell users what you want them to do! Make it clear how they can act on your messaging, and make it that much easier for the user to convert. 

When it comes to ad copy, especially improving CTR, the only way to know what your audience will respond to is to test! As a rule of thumb, only test one thing at a time so that you can learn what’s working or not working. Always have some sort of test running to ensure you’re always learning.

How is Quality Score Calculated?

Google looks at historical performance across 3 components to determine Quality Score: 

Expected click-through rate (CTR): This is an estimate of how likely it is that someone will click on an ad. 

Ad relevance: This measures how closely the ad matches the user’s search intent, taking into account the search term and the ad’s headline, description, and other assets.

Landing page experience: This measures how relevant the landing page is that the ad leads to, taking into account factors such as load time, mobile-friendliness, and the relevance of the landing page content to the user’s search intent.

For each keyword, these 3 components receive a rating of Below Average, Average, and Above Average. Cumulatively, those ratings result in a 1-10 Quality Score for each keyword. Think of the overall score as a metric to find keywords that need improvement, and the individual component ratings a guide to what exactly to improve.

How Does Quality Score Affect CPC?

Quality Score itself is not a metric used by Google Ads to determine your CPC; rather, it’s a diagnostic tool that Google Ads provides advertisers to understand where opportunities for better ad quality exist. That said, ad quality is a huge factor in determining how much you pay for each click on your ads, or your CPC. Each time a search is conducted, an auction occurs in which Google evaluates each advertisers bid x ad quality, and ranks the advertisers for that search result. This is called ad rank. 

Quality Score ensures that both advertisers and users stay happy with the results they get. When you run ads on Google, you can’t simply buy your way to the top of the search results. Ad rank is Google’s formula for determining the order of ads on the search results. It’s determined each and every time someone searches and the auction runs. Rather than allowing advertisers to simply have the highest bid and therefore get the highest position in the search results, Google combines the advertiser’s bid with their ad quality to determine their ad rank. Yes, you do need to bid competitively as an advertiser, but that alone won’t lead to success. 

What is a Good Quality Score?

Most paid search advertisers would agree that an 8-10 Quality Score is great. For branded keywords, you should easily be able to achieve a 10 Quality Score. 

The lowest hanging fruit for Quality Score improvement are keywords with a QS below 5. That’s where you’ll see the most opportunity for improvement, and where you’ll see the biggest payoff for your cost per click. After optimizing for your below 5 keywords, then move on to any keywords with a Quality Score between 5 and 7. 

How to See Quality Score in Google Ads

Quality Score is calculated only at the keyword level. Third-party tools may provide ad group or campaign level quality scores by aggregating the keyword quality scores, but in Google Ads, the only way to find quality score is at the keyword level.

To find quality score in Google Ads, navigate to your keywords, and go to Modify Columns. From there, select these columns:

• Quality Score
• Exp. CTR
• Ad relevance
• Landing Page exp.

You can also add columns to view historical Quality Score, which allows you to see changes in Quality Score and the other columns over time. To do this, select those columns, then segment by day. 

Conclusion

While Quality Score has been around for a long time, it’s important to stay on top of the most updated guidance for optimizing your accounts. As long as Google Ads is evolving, so too should your approach to campaign management. That said, one thing about Quality Score remains true over 20 years later: Both users and advertisers benefit from high quality ads. Seeing Quality Score through this lens will enable you to use it as a valuable diagnostic tool to improve performance throughout your account, as well as your bottom line.

How to Improve Google Ads Quality Score in 2023 is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

In this guide, we’re breaking down exactly how our team of PPC experts approaches Google Ads optimizations. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Analyzing Performance Trends

• Setting up Columns
• Selecting a Date Range
• Tips for Analyzing Google Ads Performance

Optimizing your Google Ads account

• Search Terms
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Optimizing Text Ad Performance
• Optimizing Quality Score
• Optimizing Audience Targeting
• Optimize Geography Targeting
• Optimizing Bid Strategy
• Optimizing Impression Share

Analyzing Google Ads Performance Data

Before we get into the strategies for optimizing Google Ads campaigns, let’s lay the groundwork for how to analyze performance data in the Google Ads platform.

Configure Your Columns

When you’re analyzing your Google Ads account’s performance data, you’ll want to start by getting the right view of the data. The first step is cleaning up the columns you’re looking at so that you have all the right metrics at your fingertips.

Not sure which columns to add? Start with these as a core list:

• Cost / conv. (cost per conversion = cost/conversions)
• Conv. rate (conversion rate = conversions/clicks * 100)
• Conversions 
• Cost
• Clicks
• CTR (click-through rate = clicks/impressions * 100)
• Impr. (impressions)
• Avg. CPC (average cost per click = cost/clicks)
• Search impr. Share (search impression share)
• Search lost IS (rank) (search lost impression share (rank))
• Search lost IS (budget) (search lost impression share (budget))

Keep in mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the columns and data you can gather and compare across campaigns in this view. You should absolutely explore other columns and uncover what trends may be available to you outside of just these (Google Ads provides definitions for all of the metrics in the platform if you hover over the column name).

Select a Date Range

The next step in setting up your performance data analysis is selecting the date range(s) to review. There isn’t one best date range to look at, although the last 30 days is a pretty common starting point. However, make sure to do some bigger historical lookbacks as well; think 90 days or more. You should also look at the last 14 days compared to the previous period to understand how any recent changes you’ve made are impacting performance. 

By reviewing trends over several time frames, and comparing both period-over-period and year-over-year, you’ll get a holistic understanding of how your campaigns are performing. Google Ads makes it very easy to see comparison trends, and you can even expand out the columns to get more details on how well you’re meeting your advertising goals. You’ll also uncover context for those trends, such as recent changes and seasonality.

Tips for Analyzing Google Ads Performance

Now that your Google Ads platform is configured and ready for your performance analysis, here are some important tips and best practices to keep in mind as you analyze the trends.

Review Results of Past Optimizations

If you are regularly optimizing your Google Ads account, it’s important that you take the time to understand how those past changes impacted performance. By giving those changes a reasonable amount of time to make an impact and then reviewing how metrics changed after, you’ll understand whether those changes had the desired outcome, or whether a pivot in strategy should take place. Should you do more of that type of change in your account, or should you test a different strategy?

To do this, set your date range for the day of that last change to yesterday, then compare to the previous period. By setting this date range, you’ll isolate your review to focus on the impact of the last optimization you made, and be able to easily observe how the metrics changed. (This is why it’s key to not change or test too many things at once; it can be much harder to isolate optimizations and understand their impact.)

Focus on Quality Metrics Over Quantity Metrics

The metrics you’re looking at—and how you’re looking at them—makes a huge difference in the quality of analysis you’re able to pull out. 

Think of metrics in two categories: 

• First is “quantity” metrics, which is the number of things. These columns would be impressions, clicks, conversion, cost. 
• The other category is “quality” metrics. Think: click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per click. 

While quantity metrics are definitely useful, they don’t give you the same relative read on performance as quality metrics. 

For example, if you increased the monthly budget by $500, maybe you got 100 more clicks as a result. However, you didn’t necessarily do anything differently to get more clicks other than increase your budget. You could get those 100 additional clicks, but also see CTR and conversion rate decrease—meaning they are possibly lower-quality clicks. As a result, you get fewer conversions for your monthly budget. 

Your goal with Google Ads is always to get the most out of every dollar spent, and quality metrics allow you to get a better picture of efficiency.

Understand How Metrics Impact One Another

The metrics in Google Ads all impact one another, and by digging a bit deeper you can understand the root of why performance trends are occurring.

Here are some examples:

Increasing Cost Per Click

If cost per click goes up, but conversion rate stays the same, then cost per conversion will also go up. Conversely, if cost per click goes up, but conversion rate also goes up even more, then cost per conversion can still decrease even with a higher CPC. 

This would happen if, for example, you paused some lower intent keywords. In doing so, other higher quality, but more competitive keywords get a larger share of the budget. You’ve potentially traded cheaper, lower converting keywords for more expensive, higher quality keywords. Your CPCs may be trending the wrong way, but your bottom line will benefit. 

Increasing Click-through Rate

When you optimize your ad copy and your click-through rate increases, users are clicking on your ads more frequently when they see them. This is a good thing! However, an unintended consequence could be seeing impression share decrease. Because you are getting clicks more frequently, you are burning through your daily budget more quickly.

On the flip side, if you optimize your ad copy and improve your quality score, you could see CPCs decrease as a result. This may actually improve your impression share because your budget lasts longer and you’re ranking higher. 

Find the Area of Greatest Impact

When optimizing a Google Ads account, it’s tempting to want to go down every rabbit hole and touch every single part of the account. In reality, you can’t—and shouldn’t—do everything all at once. First, that might lead to a pretty lengthy tuning session. But more importantly, if you optimize and change too much at the same time within the same campaigns and ad groups, it will be hard to determine what exactly worked and what didn’t work. 

Instead, taking a strategic and gradual approach to optimizations will allow you to see how each change impacts performance. Then you can know to do more of that or test something different. 

So, how do you determine what to optimize? You’ll want to find the area where you can have the greatest impact and drill down from there. 

Think of the Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 rule). To find the area of greatest impact, you might simply start with the campaign or ad group that gets the most traffic and is allotted most of the budget. Any optimization you make to that campaign or ad group will have an outsized impact on performance. 

From there, look at where the greatest opportunity for improvement is. If you can greatly improve conversion rate or click-through rate on a very low performer, that could be more important than gaining a small improvement on an already high performer.

Lastly, consider the types of optimizations you may make and think about which of those could make the greatest impact. Changing ad copy on a single ad would have a very small impact while changing a bid strategy, budget allocation, or a landing page would touch several different campaigns and ad groups. 

Use Segmentation to Uncover Opportunities

When you’re reviewing campaign performance, you have the option to segment out performance data in several different ways. Doing this can be eye-opening for seeing which “under the hood” optimizations could be made to improve performance. 

One example of this would be Google Ads network type. Take a look at how Search Partners performs vs Google Search Network—is CTR or conversion rate for Search Partners helping performance or dragging it down? If it’s the latter, then simply turning off Search Partners will allow that budget to be spent on the better-performing Search network and make an immediate improvement in that campaign’s performance. 

Another example is devices—if you’re seeing particularly low performance on one device type like mobile, for example, that can lead to actionable learnings and optimizations like improving your mobile page speed and mobile friendliness to improve performance.

Focus on Your Goals

With all of these prior steps in mind, what this process ultimately comes down to is your key objectives for the campaign. Yes, all metrics do impact the others, but ultimately you’ll want to focus on the trends for your most important key performance indicators (KPIs). And, 9 times out of 10, cost per conversion is going to be the holy grail of KPIs because it really gets to the heart of how efficiently you’re getting sales or leads for the money you’re investing.

However, there are certainly times where other KPIs are paramount, such as clicks or impression share. Whatever your objective, start with that most-important KPI and understand how the trends fluctuate, then go from there.

Optimizing your Google Ads account

Now that you’ve reviewed your performance trends and know where to focus your optimizations, it’s time to get down to the business of making your Google Ads account perform better. As mentioned above, you can’t and shouldn’t do all of this in one go. But, these are areas of the account you should be optimizing regularly.

Search Term Review

As Google becomes looser with match types, search term reviews are critical to the health of your Google Ads campaign. Although search term data is limited, you will almost always find something in search terms that’s actionable. 

As with any optimization, it’s helpful to narrow down to the biggest area of opportunity. For search term reviews, you could look for a high spending ad group or keyword that has a low conversion rate or click-through rate. Navigate to that ad group or keyword, and look at the search terms specific to that selection. Sort the search terms by highest to lowest impressions (to see the terms your ads show up for most), and by highest to lowest cost (to see where you’re spending your budget most). 

Some obviously irrelevant search terms may immediately jump out at you. Others may be less obvious, but the low CTR or conversion rate indicates a problem. For the less obvious problem search terms, plug the search term into a Google search and take a look at the SERP. You may see that the other results have a totally different or mixed intent, and that may give you some indication of why the performance is low.

Once you’ve identified problematic keywords, you have options on what changes to make:

• You could pause the keyword (don’t remove it!)
• You can edit the match type to be more specific
• You can add negative keywords 

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization services should be part of every optimization you make in a Google Ads account. Each change you implement should be leading to a better conversion rate. However, if you’re seeing a downward trend or low conversion rate, here are three things to look at:

Troubleshoot Conversion Tracking 

There’s nothing worse than spending time optimizing for conversions, only to realize that the setback was due to a Google Tag Manager configuration issue. To do QA for your conversion set-up, you’ll go to the Tools section in Google Ads, and click to Conversions. From there, check out your conversions and the statuses associated. 

What you’re looking for is “tag inactive”—if you see this, then you know something is wrong with your conversion tracking. If you see “no recent conversions”, that’s not necessarily a sign of an issue. 

Also, remember that any time you change or add a new form, landing page, or call to action on your website, you need to ensure those conversions are being tracked. If not, you’re missing out on conversion data once you start sending paid traffic there.

Find Wasted Ad Spend

An easy way to get a sense of how your conversion rate is performing is to look at wasted ad spend. Here’s how to find it:

1. Set your date range to anywhere from the last 30-90 days, depending on how many conversions you typically get.
2. In a Search campaign, navigate to Keywords.
3. Add a filter for conversions < 1. This allows you to see the keywords that haven’t converted during your date range.
4. Sort by cost, and you can see what your biggest budget wasters are. 
5. Go back to the Search Term Review steps and analyze what’s not working for these low-performing keywords. 

Analyze Budget Allocation

Another quick but high-impact way to improve conversion rate is to analyze how your budget is allocated compared to conversion rate and cost per conversion metrics. Look at conversion rates and cost/conversion across your Search campaigns and find high-spending, underperforming campaigns.

Are there other campaigns that are performing better where you can allocate more money and increase those good results even more? 

On a more granular level, dive deeper into underperforming or high spending campaigns. Within these, are there outlier ad groups where you’re seeing particularly good or bad conversion metrics? If so, you could consider separating the outlier into its own campaign to gain more control over exactly how much you spend on it, rather than having it share a budget with other ad groups.

Optimizing Text Ad Performance

Your ad copy is essential for driving your target audience to your website for two big reasons:

1. Click-Through Rate: Compelling ad copy can entice your target audience to click on your ad over your competitor’s ad. 
2. Quality score: How relevant your ads are to the keywords you’re targeting can greatly impact how much you have to spend on each click.

With the sunsetting of Expanded Text Ads and emergence of Responsive Search Ads (RSAs), Google has taken a lot of the manual work (and also advertiser control) out of optimizing ad copy. 

By creating Responsive Search Ads, you provide Google with several headline and description options, and Google’s machine learning makes the decisions about which combinations to serve based on performance. That said, you should still be actively reviewing, testing, and optimizing ad copy.

As always, narrow your focus to ad groups where a higher CTR would make the biggest impact, and start there. Here are two ways to do this:

• Start with the ad group that gets the most impressions. If you could harness that high search volume into more site visits with a higher CTR, there’s a lot of potential for ad copy optimization to have a big impact. 
• Look at your top three converting ad groups, then start with the ad group of those that has the lowest CTR. If an ad group has proven to work for you by having a high conversion rate, then do everything you can to drive more traffic to it.

Now that you’ve selected which ads to optimize, here’s a quick guide to improving that ad copy. 

Review Ad Performance

Each headline and description of an RSA is given a Performance rating of Best, Good, Low, or Learning. 

• For the Best ratings, look for common denominators and trends. You can take those learnings to do more of what’s working well in other ad groups.
• For the Low ratings, replace those with new ad copy to test out. Keep notes on the changes you make and look back to see if the rating improved.

If you don’t see this column under Asset Details, your ad doesn’t yet have enough impressions to give a rating. Instead, you can review the overall “Ad Strength” rating. You can also look at the most common ad combinations to find what headlines and descriptions Google is favoring based on performance. 

Analyze Competitor Ad Copy

There are many tools out there to help you conduct a competitive analysis, but a great place to start is with a good old fashioned search engine results page (SERP) review. Using the Google Ad Preview tool, search some of your top keywords and search terms and objectively observe the SERP and your competitors’ ads. 

What catches your eye, and how could you leverage that for your account? For example, do all of your competitors have star ratings on their ads? Or pricing? These are eye-catching elements that you should be using as well.

Use All Available Ad Assets

Google favors ads with all assets (formerly ad extensions) utilized, so you’ll want to make sure you’ve got any applicable assets configured. Moreover, make sure your assets are strategically optimized for each ad group. 

For example, set up your sitelinks at the ad group or campaign level so that they are perfectly customized for the search intent and needs for those specific searchers. Someone searching your brand name should see a different set of sitelinks than someone searching for a top of funnel keyword because there is a different intent and level of familiarity for those two search terms.

Optimizing Quality Score

Quality score can have a big impact on your ad rank and cost per click. The higher your quality score, the less you’ll have to pay for each click, and the difference adds up over time. 

There are three components to your quality score, which is calculated at the keyword level: 

• Ad relevance: How closely does your ad copy match the intent of the user’s search? 
• Landing page experience: How relevant and useful is your landing page to the user once they click on your ad?
• Expected click-through rate: How likely is it that your ad will be clicked when it’s shown? 

To find which keywords to optimize, sort your keywords by highest to lowest clicks in the last 30 days (exclude keywords with very few clicks). Starting at the highest clicks, identify high CPC keywords with a quality score below 5. You’ll see a bigger impact by improving the very low quality scores (1-5) than you will by bringing a 7 quality score up to an 8. 

Once you’ve identified the keywords that need quality score optimization most, review the individual quality score ratings: Landing Page Experience, Expected CTR, and Ad Relevance. Each of these factors gets its own score, so you can see what the area of focus needs to be. 

Landing Page Experience is often the best place to start. If many of your keywords show a “below average” landing page experience, there could potentially be a single optimization, like improving page speed, that could impact all of your keywords at once. Besides page speed and mobile experience, simple page content can have a big impact on quality score. If there is little content on your landing page, then there’s not much of an opportunity to have your keywords also be present on the landing page. Again, by adding more relevant content to the page (which includes your keywords), you’ll be able to impact the quality score of many keywords at once. 

For Ad Relevance, make sure that your keywords are present in your ad copy itself. Comb through and make sure that each keyword is actually in at least one headline or description. If you find that there are too many keywords in your ad group to fit all of them into your ad copy, you may consider whether your keywords should be grouped into more than one ad group.

In addition, keep in mind that having the ad copy and landing page copy sync up is also a factor in quality score. Make sure that you’re using similar language in both the ad copy and on the landing page, and of course that each contains your keywords, so that there is complete synergy between the three.

Optimizing Audience Targeting

Google Ads is relying more and more on audience signals for its machine learning. To give Google a headstart with this, and to give yourself additional data points, you can, and should, add audiences to your search campaigns. 

There are two options for adding audiences: 

• Targeting, meaning you only want to target people who are in this audience and also searching for your target keywords. This set-up isn’t recommended unless you have a very specific reason, like search remarketing. Applying the targeting option will really limit your reach with search, which usually isn’t necessary since you’re targeting a certain search intent already.
• Observation, meaning you simply want Google to report on how this audience’s performance metrics compare with other audiences and the average. Before Smart Bidding, advertisers would apply bid adjustments to these observation audiences to manually control bids at the audience level. Nowadays, you simply add audiences that you want Google to observe and mostly let Google do the bid adjustments. The goal with this is to simply point out audiences that you want Google to observe, and then allow Google’s machine learning to adjust bids faster and smarter than you could. 

Review your audience performance data.

Even though Google is actually doing the heavy lifting on optimizing bids by audience, it is definitely worth reviewing audience performance regularly. To do this, it’s actually helpful to start with audience data from Google Analytics, rather than only looking at audience performance in Google Ads. You can view the Analytics audience data both for your paid campaign specifically, and for your site as a whole. Here are some ways to use that Google Analytics data:

• Review the audiences that Google Analytics shows your ads to be bringing to the site to gain more clarity into the search intent of those users. For example, if you see a very high number of Job Seekers in your audience, but you’re not intending to use your ads for recruitment, this may be an indication that the search intent of people clicking on your ads is misaligned with your goals. By reviewing search terms, adding negative keywords, and potentially even excluding that audience, you can use that nuanced information to filter out the wrong audience.
• Google Analytics audience data is also helpful for identifying audience characteristics that may be unexpected. When it comes to audiences, and really anything in digital marketing, we always advise leaving our assumptions at the door and letting the data lead the way. For example, you may assume that your best audience is coupon clippers but may find instead in your Google Analytics data that luxury shoppers make up a large portion of your audience and also convert well. Having this information may help inform other audiences that you want Google to observe in your campaigns, as well as things like ad creative tests. 

Optimize Geography Targeting

Similar to audiences, geography is another targeting element that digital marketers used to spend a lot of time optimizing. However, with Smart Bidding, adjusting bids based on geography has now become an area that Google does a lot of the heavy lifting in. But, just like with audiences, geography performance is worth a regular review to uncover surprising trends.

To review geography performance, you’ll navigate to the campaign (geography is set at the campaign level), and click on Locations. From there, you can narrow down to country, state, city, etc. and you can review performance for both your Targeted locations (the location you targeted) and your Matched locations (the physical location or location of interest of the user).

Sort the geography by cost to see where you’re spending your budget. Look for places with high spend but low CTR or low conversion rate. If your geo target is casting a wide net, you may be pulling in high-population areas where users are unlikely to convert due to simple proximity. If you were to remove a high-spending, low-performing geography target from your campaign, you would allow better-performing areas to spend that budget instead, and you’ll see an overall boost in results in turn.

Remember that with digital marketing, geography is not an exact science like it is with something like direct mail. People may live in one area, work in another area, and search from their mobile devices in a totally different area. For this reason, it’s unwise to try to be overly prescriptive to Google about where your target audience is. Rather, let the clear trends lead the way in any optimizations.

Optimizing Bid Strategy

While search term reviews and ad copy tuning should happen frequently, other optimizations like bid strategy changes are great for making a big, campaign- or account-wide impact. Big impact optimizations should be tested much less frequently and given ample time to fully show results. 

Bid strategy testing can have a huge impact on your campaign’s performance—good or bad. By changing your bid strategy, you have the potential to refocus Google on a different goal for your campaign and drastically change performance. On the flip side, bid strategies affect all of a campaign, so any testing should be approached with the expectation that there will be some learning time and potential performance disruption. It’s probably not something you’d want to do during a critical period of the year, for example around the holidays for online retailers. 

While you can completely change the bid strategy setting for your campaign, you can also make smaller tweaks for a more measured approach. For example, in campaigns where you’re targeting a certain cost per acquisition (CPA), you’ll want to occasionally review and adjust your CPA target to gradually guide Google towards a lower CPA. You don’t want to do this too dramatically as it could negatively impact your campaign’s visibility and results. However, small but gradual tuning will provide improved CPAs in the long-term. 

Another opportunity for bid optimization is evaluating whether a campaign-level bid strategy is appropriate, or whether those settings should be broken down at the ad group level. Because you can set target CPAs at the ad group level, you can take advantage of that to fine tune your goals, especially if you want to keep ad groups together in a campaign but they tend to have vastly different CPAs. This way, you allow Google’s machine learning to treat the ad groups individually, rather than having the same target CPA for all of them.

Optimizing Impression Share

Impression share is how often your ads are shown to your target audience for your target keywords. It’s a metric that is often debated because it doesn’t directly impact performance, and can be leveraged by platforms and agencies to draw more budget out of advertisers. 

Impression share goals should be viewed individually for your own industry, business goals, and campaigns. If you’re an e-commerce retailer with a product priced in the impulse-buy range, then a high impression share may not be instrumental in your campaign’s performance, because people may only need to see your ad result once to make a decision. However, if your business is one that has a long sales cycle and decision making process, your target audience may do dozens of searches before purchasing. In that case, the more you can stay present on the SERP and in front of your target audience, the more credibility and top-of-mindness you’ll grow. 

With your individual business and goals in mind, you can review impression share periodically and make decisions about bid strategies, budgets, keyword and audience targeting, and more. Here’s how you can pull impression share data:

• Navigate to the campaigns view, and start here to see overall impression share. Impression share data can be viewed at the campaign, ad group, or even keyword level. 
• In addition to the Impression Share column, there are more detailed columns that give additional context on your impression share. A good starting point are Search lost IS (rank) and Search lost IS (budget). 
• First, review your overall impression share for the campaign. Then look at the reasons why you are losing impression share. If you’re losing impression share due to rank, you can address this with optimizations like improving quality score or fine tuning your bid strategy. If you’re losing impression share due to budget, you can address that by either adding more budget to the campaign or by reducing the keywords and/or geography you are targeting in that campaign.

Always Be Optimizing

One frequent challenge for Google advertisers is that they want to be doing more testing, or worse that their campaign is managed in a “set it and forget it” way. While you do want to approach campaign optimization in a strategic and gradual way, there is always something that you can be testing or fine-tuning to drive performance metrics higher and higher. 

Since we covered a lot of information above, here’s a recap of the most important principles to apply to optimizing your Google Ads campaign:

• Evaluate quality over quantity (e.g. conversion rate over number of conversions). 
• Find the area of greatest impact and opportunity, and start there with your optimizations.
• Limit how many changes and optimizations you apply at one time so that you can understand the impact of each change you make.
• Always use the data to make decisions and leave your assumptions at the door.
• Keep your business goals top of mind to ensure that your optimizations are working toward those goals.

How to Optimize Google Ads: The Ultimate Guide is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Search terms are defined as “the exact word or set of words a customer enters when searching” on Google. From a PPC perspective, search terms are a window into the actual intent of the searcher and how a campaign’s keywords are triggering ads based on that intent. Historically, advertisers have relied heavily on search term reports to better understand keyword performance and ensure that their ads are not showing for irrelevant searches (and wasting ad spend in the process).

This change to search term reporting does create significant limitations in account optimization. However, for most accounts, we know that in the long term it’s not efficient to use the search term report to play whack-a-mole with negative keywords. Rather, broad keywords and search term reports are an excellent way to gather the data necessary to eventually transition to a tighter audience and set of keywords for terms that have significant search volume and proven performance.

It’s valuable to instead use search term reports over time to understand the intent of the user as much as possible. Because we no longer have the full data set we used to, here are three things our team is using to supplement what’s left of the search term report.

Other Keyword Sources

If your goal is to shield your campaign from low-intent or irrelevant searches with negative keywords, let’s explore some of the other search term sources our team is turning to:

• Google Search Console – Our team loves working with organic search query data in Google Search Console (GSC) for many reasons, and the reduction in Google Ads search term data simply adds one more reason to that list. While organic and paid keyword lists and search query data are often vastly different from one another, there is some useful data to glean from this information. First, GSC search query data may give you a head start on identifying high intent, high click-through rate queries that you’ll want to bid on via exact or phrase match, especially if you’re building a keyword list from the ground up. This eliminates the need to rely on broad match types. On the flip side of this, you may see queries in the GSC report that you immediately know you don’t want to spend ad dollars on. For example, you may see career-related queries or branded queries related to negative press. If your Google Ads strategy is not aimed at either of those objectives, then that research can help round out your negative keyword list.

• Microsoft Ads – This change in search term reporting is (for now) singular to Google. Kirk Williams points out that, while the majority of advertisers apply Google findings to Microsoft Ads, we actually may start gleaning insights from Microsoft Ads, where search term data is still being reported in full, to apply to Google campaigns. While Microsoft Bing does tend to follow Google Ads pretty closely, our team pulls search term data from Microsoft Ads to supplement limited data from Google.
• Historical Google Ads search term data – Because we’re not looking at search terms as a way to actively find negative keywords, there’s a lot to be gained from simply using pre-September 2020 data if it’s available. This is not necessarily a solution that will work for every account or years down the road, but taking an extra deep dive into the historical data could help advertisers form an updated keyword strategy going forward that better accommodates the new search term reporting.

Auction Insights

Although auction insights data is also notoriously incomplete, don’t rule it out. In some cases, you’ll find it can serve as a proxy for search term data. We were recently optimizing a search campaign for a new PPC client and because the search volume is already low for this client’s niche industry, search term data was especially hard to come by. Knowing that a certain keyword had garnered some impressions, but was showing a low click-through rate and no conversions, we looked into the auction insights report for that specific keyword. Auction insights showed only two competing sites, and they were both job board sites – not the search intent we’re going for with our ads. 

By seeing the sites that we were coming up against on the SERP for that specific keyword, we got a glimpse into the intent of the searchers that we weren’t able to see from the search terms report and made adjustments to negatives and match types accordingly.

Audience Data

Similar to the above example where auction insights data serves as a proxy for search term data, audience data can serve the same purpose. By looking at traffic quantity and performance data for in-market audiences in both Google Ads and Google Analytics, advertisers may find broad insights into common user intent. If your campaign is lacking a significant amount of search term data and there are indications that intent may be off, in-market audience data may help build a more complete picture.

For example, similar to the auction insights instance above, if you find that a significant portion of traffic coming to your site is categorized as in-market for employment, you may need to tighten up keyword intent or even create a negative bid adjustment for that audience. That way you don’t spend ad dollars on job seekers when finding new clients is your objective.

Another example is one of our clients who has the word “Security” in its name, and while our client is a SaaS company, we often saw searches for a home security company with the same brand name appear in the branded keyword search terms reports. Now that we may not see those search terms as fully, we can use in-market audience data to look for traffic coming to the site whose intent was to find the home security company and optimize accordingly. Of course, this is not a perfect science, and someone looking for a SaaS provider may also be looking for home security, but audience data can help paint a more complete picture of search intent.

Demographic data may also play a similar role in indicating hits and misses in intent. For example, if your target audience is a higher-level decision maker within an organization, many times a younger age bracket may not align with that audience. If your demographic data reveals a high volume of 18-24 age users, that could be an indication that the intent of the search terms you can’t see are possibly more informational than purchase-driven (if you’ve ever seen blatant test question queries in your search term report, you’ll know what I mean).

Conclusion

Loss of access to data for something as important as search terms is undoubtedly a drawback for advertisers on Google. That said, a well-optimized and smartly configured search campaign always draws on insights and learnings beyond just keywords. Successful Google Ads agencies are habitually pulling insights from many sources like the ones above to understand the perspective, motivation, and intent of their target audience.

Search Term Report Changes: 3 Ways To Supplement Lost Search Term Data is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

What we’ve found, overwhelmingly, is that there isn’t an all-purpose recommendation that will work for every single one of our clients. Social distancing and an economic downturn will impact each industry in completely different ways, so there can’t be a one-size-fits-all answer. We also know that things are changing daily, so the right answer today may be different than the right answer tomorrow.

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Despite much uncertainty, we’ve been able to provide guidance to our clients as they begin to reshape their strategies. Here are some of the ways we’re advising our clients to navigate the current climate.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Paid Media

• As always, make data-driven decisions. We can make assumptions about how our customers will respond to this crisis, but we’ve also never been in this situation before. Look at your analytics often, paying close attention to the most recent 1-2 weeks to see how the numbers are changing, then dive further into your data to try and understand where those changes are stemming from. 
• Find creative ways to take your business online and be proactive in getting the word out. If you normally do in-person consulting, find a tool that allows you to offer a seamless virtual meeting. If you typically depend on store visits for customers to see your products up close, amp up the use of video to showcase your products online. If your business is exclusively brick-and-mortar, consider options like e-commerce, delivery, and virtual content. Once you’ve worked out a new online model, let people know via your PPC campaigns and social media.
• People have questions, so make it easy for them to find answers. Keep your branded search ads running so that people can easily find your site or phone number. Have you created a COVID-19 FAQ page? Add it as a sitelink to your search ads. By making answers easy to find now, you’re more likely to win a long-term customer once things are back to normal. 
• Know how your competitors are responding to the crisis. By using tools like SEMRush and Auction Insights, you can get a good (although imperfect) sense of how your competition may be changing their PPC strategy. You may find that there are now gaps that you can leverage, meaning lower competition and lower CPCs. You may also find that your best bet will be to max out your advertising for a specific niche audience that isn’t being targeted by the competition. 
• Above all, be sensitive. Don’t be the company that takes advantage of the situation to play into people’s fear in order to sell more. Be aware that, yes, life is still going on, but it’s not business as usual. Empathy will go a long way here, and by putting yourself in your audience’s shoes, you may be able to understand how best to continue reaching them with information and content they find valuable.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• SEO is a long-term strategy. On-page optimizations, technical SEO, and link building all work together to yield results that you may not see take hold for a few weeks or months. We don’t know when life will get back to normal, but it will eventually, and if you can continue to work on long-term SEO initiatives, you should. That’s the ideal answer. The realistic answer is that resources may change during this crisis. A good agency partner can help you prioritize the initiatives that will have the biggest impact on your search visibility and customize your scope of work accordingly.
• If you’re having to pause your business or close locations, work closely with your agency to update your Google My Business profile, structured data markup, etc. Doing so correctly now will help a return to normalcy go as smoothly as possible.
• Because more people are staying at home, consider how user behavior may have changed and, if possible, adjust your strategy. For example, an e-commerce site might be seeing traffic to product pages decrease, but traffic from queries relevant to the blog are still strong, making it a good time to research and post more informational content to your site.
• Utilize your agency to monitor top-ranking competitors. These sites may be intelligently adjusting their strategies in creative and unforeseen ways that might make sense to emulate.
• One possible silver lining you may find is that you now have more space and time to work on those important but not urgent projects that are somehow always being pushed to the backburner. Think building out site content, refreshing blog posts, systematic conversion rate optimization, and more.
• One question we’re helping clients answer right now is “Should we continue to push out content that isn’t related to COVID-19?” The answer is “probably”, but be mindful in promoting it. You may be adding in coronavirus-related content to your content calendar, and centering your promotion around that, but a lot of your “normal” content can still go up as well. Maybe the timeliness of your coronavirus content brings people to the site, but your evergreen content keeps them there.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

• Anticipate how you would handle coronavirus-related press about your business if, for example, one of your employees or customers were to test positive. Make sure that you have a “crisis playbook” in place for how you would respond and which channels you would use to share your response.
• Pay close attention to your social monitoring tools. People are also asking a lot of questions like “Is X open?” or “Is X canceled?”. Being responsive and helpful will foster a positive reputation for your business. 
• In the event that your brand becomes associated with COVID-19, and the search result sticks, know what options are available to help mitigate the negative impact of your new branded SERP. Biogen and its conference where the virus spread rapidly is a great example of COVID-19 taking over a brand’s story, and there are ORM solutions out there to help mitigate the negative impacts. 

We can expect the coronavirus situation to evolve and have a heavy impact on our society and economy for months to come. Digital marketing can be incredibly agile, and we should be prepared to be nimble in our approach as well. Hopefully, this provides some guidelines for your digital strategy, and if you’d like to get more specifics on solutions that can help your business weather the storm, we’d love to chat with you. 

Digital Marketing in the Era of Coronavirus is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

One of the most frequent questions I hear from clients about their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is “Why would I pay to show up for my own company name?”. Branded keywords certainly have the potential to prop up performance metrics with low cost per click, high conversion and click through rates, and nearly perfect quality scores. Some agencies will use branded keyword bidding for that very reason. Those reasons alone, though, aren’t enough to make branded keywords a standard part of the PPC strategy for every business. For many clients with a limited budget, even a small amount spent on branded keywords would provide more value if used in other ways.

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There are a few circumstances, however, for which bidding on branded keywords absolutely should be a part of the PPC strategy. If one or more of these 6 factors applies to your business, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities when people search for your company name.

1. You’re Seeking to Build Credibility and Recognition

Beyond the more obvious goal of conversions, coupling top paid and organic positions in search results is a highly effective tactic for building brand credibility and recognition. For a newer, growing, or less well-known brand, such as the sustainable and transparency-focused apparel company Everlane, owning the top half of the SERP with both a #1 ad position and a #1 organic ranking, along with a knowledge panel and the brand’s social profiles link, instills confidence in the consumer when researching the brand. 

2. The Search Results for Your Industry are Highly Competitive

Perhaps the most common reason behind the strategy of bidding on branded terms is winning a highly competitive SERP for those queries. The mattress industry is famously competitive both online and offline, with competitive bidding being so common that branded keyword bidding becomes essential. Casper was a pioneering brand in the online mattress world and even with its name recognition, the SERP for a “casper” search shows the need for branded keyword bidding as a number of competitors are trying to capture the interest in online mattress buying generated by Casper. Bidding on your own name acts as an insurance policy to deter clicks to competitor sites.

3. You’re in a Brand-Agnostic Industry

The previous point that you should bid on branded keywords if the search results page for your brand includes competitor paid ads becomes especially important if your brand loyalty isn’t stellar. Perhaps brand loyalty is a challenge for your company specifically, or it could simply be less of a factor for your industry as a whole.

Moving companies are an example of an industry in which brand loyalty doesn’t play as much of a role in purchasing decisions as it would in another industry, such as smartphones. Even with other positives working in your favor and prompting consumers to search for your brand (such as good past buying experiences, lots of strong online reviews, and good old-fashioned referrals), any inconvenience or distraction along the path to purchase has the potential to derail the sale.

For a moving company, which an average person uses only once every few years and is often a price-driven decision, we can expect consumers to be open to getting a quote from or reading the reviews for any other company that appears on the SERP. Your competitors’ search ads with appealing offers can be a tempting distraction from the original search for your company name. A brand-agnostic consumer will easily change course, especially if your brand isn’t highly visible and easy to find in the top position.

4. Your Business Has Frequently Changing Offers

Why hold back your best offers? If your business has frequently changing promotions, your paid ad can be a great way to make sure consumers who are interested in your brand know about your sales and have one more reason to buy from you. Whereas your organic result is somewhat out of your control and isn’t meant to change with each week’s new sale, your paid ad is a great way to ensure people see your most compelling current offer, such as Whole Foods’ limited time $4/lb grilled salmon sale.

Keep in mind that it’s not guaranteed which ad extensions will show with your paid ad, but being high on the SERP will increase the likelihood of more extensions showing. That being said, use ad scheduling to make sure your best offers are in your main ad copy.

5. You Want Your Customers to Know About New Products or Services

As mentioned above, paid ads provide an opportunity to control the messaging in a way an organic result can’t. One specific way to take advantage of this is through ad extensions. Whereas Google makes the ultimate decision about your organic sitelinks, paid ad extensions like sitelinks, callout extensions and structured snippets present an excellent opportunity to ensure your customers and those interested in your brand see what you want them to, such as new products and services or new site content. The makeup brand Glossier uses this tactic to promote its new Bestsellers Duo product.

6. The SERP for Your Brand Contains Negative Sentiment

We often leverage Google Adwords for our Online Reputation Management clients as a way to push any negative sentiment on the SERP down below the fold. Although this certainly won’t make the negative content go away, it can create an entirely different above-the-fold experience than would otherwise be present. In the example below, a search for “trump hotel” generates positive, branded results above-the-fold. Sure, if you scroll down further you’ll see a number of negative articles as shown in the 2nd screen shot. For an interested hotel guest, what is seen immediately when doing their search not only leads to a direct path to purchase, but also shields them from seeing content that may deter their reservation.

Above the fold:

Full SERP:

A branded keyword strategy may not make sense for every PPC campaign. However, they can be a powerful tool for certain business challenges.

6 Times Branded Keywords Should Be Part of Your PPC Strategy is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

The last piece is simple, but in all the excitement of the rest of it, can be overlooked: What do you want the user to do on your site?

You’ve made a strong first impression online and a potential new customer is on your site – great! Are you getting in your own way of converting these website visitors to customers? These common sense reminders will help you keep the user and your end goal in mind.

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Unclear Calls To Action

One of the first lessons I learned in sales is simple: Ask for the sale. This is just as true on a website as it is during a sales pitch. Does your site make it completely clear what the next step should be?

As a digital marketer and a consumer, I’ve seen countless websites that forego this kind of clarity for the sake of design, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Keeping in mind the goals of your site, do you make it easy for your consumer to convert? Are there elements of your site which are leading the consumer to something besides a conversion?

Here are some other questions to consider, depending on your conversion goals.

• If the most important conversion to you is phone calls, is your phone number prominent on the site in multiple places? Is it above the fold? Is it large and bold? Is it clickable on a mobile device? For example, when I’m searching for restaurants to make a dinner reservation on my mobile phone, I often find that restaurants don’t have a clickable phone number on their site, which sends me back to the SERP for the click-to-call. All that’s doing is creating the possibility that I will find a different restaurant instead.
• Are you most interested in foot traffic? Make sure that your physical address isn’t only found in tiny writing in your footer or hidden on a Contact page. Both of those are important, but your location should be easy to find as soon as the consumer reaches your site.
• Are you holding back on your best offers? Does your business offer a unique free trial period or consultation? Is there a discount for first time buyers? This information should be clearly emphasized on your site – there’s no reason to hold back.

User-Unfriendly Forms

Exactly nobody enjoys filling out forms, and although we are getting smarter about them it’s always worth revisiting the user experience on your forms to ensure it’s fine-tuned for optimal completion rate. Here are some questions to ask when analyzing your site’s forms:

• Have you A/B tested key elements of your form recently? This includes the page position, contents and formatting of your form. You might be surprised by what you learn, even if you’ve optimized in the past.
• Is all of that information actually necessary? Do you mainly communicate with your clients via email and text? Then perhaps a mailing address isn’t necessary. If there isn’t a compelling reason why you need certain information, try cutting it out. Even if you really do use the extra information you’re getting, is it appropriate for your site, or is it possible that it could feel intrusive to the consumer who is new to your brand?
• Is it mobile optimized? These days, this is non-negotiable. Your form should be vertically aligned, require no zooming and have large buttons.

Slow Lead Response Time

Like it or not, we have become instant gratification junkies. Smart phones and an abundance of connectivity have made patience an unnecessary virtue. If getting a potential customer to submit a form, send an email, or call is the goal of your time and investment in digital, are you prepared to respond quickly enough to actually leverage the lead?

For example, just this week I submitted a form inquiring information on a gym’s website. Within minutes, I received the perfunctory “We’ve received your email and will be reaching out with more information soon!” email. That was 3 days ago. Life gets busy, other gyms have more information on their site or are quicker to call back, and just like that I’m a lost lead.

The odds of making successful contact with a lead, much less closing the sale, are exponentially lower if it takes more than just a few minutes to respond. Obviously it’s not always possible to respond that quickly. Consider these options:

• Does your website emphasize calls to action that don’t actually make sense for your business? If you are with clients and unavailable to answer the phone or return calls for most of the day, putting your phone number front and center on your site probably doesn’t make sense.
• Do most of the inquiries you receive relate mostly to the same few questions or topics? If so, how can you leverage your site to provide this information, or provide it more clearly? This can include hours, directions, pricing, events, or even tools like rate calculators. Consider starting with an FAQ page.
• Is it something you can outsource? Depending on your business, there could be a strong case for hiring someone else to field incoming leads.

Poor Phone Presence

Call tracking and recording can be a great attribution tool for digital marketing, but sometimes its biggest value actually turns out to be sales training. I’ve worked with many clients who were surprised to hear their strongest sales associates completely missing out on sales opportunities on the phone (or worse, providing a negative experience for the potential customer).

Whether or not you have call recordings to assess, consider implementing the following to ensure that hard earned leads aren’t lost unnecessarily during that all-important phone call.

• Are your team members thinking of incoming calls as an interruption, or as an opportunity? Whether a potential new customer or an unhappy current customer, these interactions on the phone should be viewed by everyone in your organization as an extension of your brick-and-mortar sales floor. I’ve seen outstanding phone interactions turn around even the most negative client relationships.
• Is your team aware of all of the marketing campaigns you’re running?  Make sure to fill your team in on what marketing campaigns you’re running, what your ads say, specials on the website, etc. to create a cohesive customer experience. Your team may be used to only talking with your regulars or people finding your business by word-of-mouth. Digital marketing is a great way to be found online by a new audience, but it’s important that your team is expecting and prepared for new types of inquiries.
• Have you set clear expectations for customer service standards on the phone? I used to work for a manager who, even after years of experience leading account management teams, still kept a list of customer service reminders on her desk – and she would actually refer to them often! Reminders like these are too basic for no one. I’ve also worked with seasoned account managers who spent all day on the phone and still kept mirrors at their desk to remind them to smile – because yes, you can hear a smile. Set clear expectations for customer service on the phone and provide tools like these so that your team is poised for success.

Giving thought to these questions can help you put yourself in the mind of your website visitor and ultimately create an improved user experience that sets the right tone for a new customer relationship.

4 Factors That May Be Causing You To Lose Out on Digital Marketing ROI is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.